How TendWord works

Reading a list asks you to recognise a word. Sorting asks you to place it, which is a harder question, and a more useful one: you cannot drop "kettle" into a category without deciding what kind of thing a kettle is.

Getting it wrong is part of it. A misplaced word stays on the board and you try again, so the correction happens while the word is still in front of you rather than in a review session days later.

This is why the game shows two or three categories at once and never one. Sorting into a single category is not sorting — the choice is what does the work.

The word list is not scraped or generated. It is a curated library of 1,107 concrete, classifiable words across 19 everyday categories, drawn from a larger 2,618-word collection built for the TendWord mobile app and ordered by how commonly each word is actually used.

Every word carries a CEFR level behind the scenes — 477 at A1, 289 at A2, 230 at B1, 104 at B2 — which controls how difficult the meanings get and which words a beginner meets first. You never see a level or a grade; it only decides ordering.

Words with no single obvious category are deliberately excluded. Roughly 1,500 abstract words in the source library — ideas, qualities, feelings — never enter the game, because "which category does *justice* belong to" has no answer a learner can be right about.

Each word is shown with an example sentence and read aloud by your browser, so meaning and sound arrive together.

Meanings are written in English and Chinese for the whole library, and in Japanese and Korean for the portion translated so far. Pages only list the words that are actually translated into the language you are reading, so you never scroll past rows of placeholders.

You are asked to judge, not to recall. The question is never “what does apple mean” — it is which category apple belongs to. Recall only has two outcomes, you know it or you do not. A judgement has room to reason, and reasoning is the part that is enjoyable.

It has a feel. The bubbles are physical: you can drag one, and it lands. A correct sort flies into the category orb, the orb grows, points pop up and the combo climbs. A wrong one flashes red — but it does not stop you. The word stays on the board and you try again straight away.

A round is about a minute, and it is a whole thing rather than a fragment: eight words, a cleared board, up to three stars, and a recap. Short enough not to be a commitment, long enough to have a shape.

You open it and play. No account, no download, no choosing a language, no placement test.

The daily goal is twelve words — one or two rounds. It is deliberately small enough that keeping it does not require willpower on a bad day.

Nothing piles up. There is no review queue, no due dates, no backlog: levels are drawn fresh, and the “to review” line in a recap is an observation, not tomorrow's homework. Skip a week and the app has not been quietly accumulating a debt for you. This is the part most vocabulary tools get wrong — people abandon them not because they stopped being fun, but because opening them means facing everything you owe.

What you build is visible and it is yours: a streak, a five-week activity map, an achievement or two, and a card for every word you have met. You are collecting something, not paying down a progress bar.

The honest trade: because nothing is scheduled, nothing schedules your revision either. TendWord will not chase you into remembering a word — see the scope note below for what that means.